Guest Author Comes to CA
I am excited to welcome award-winning author Nina McConigley to campus next Monday. She will spend the day in classes and will give a reading of her work in Knowles at 1:00 pm. (Parents are welcome to attend the 1:00 reading as well.)
Nina McConigley's short story collection Cowboys and East Indians recently won the prestigious 2014 PEN Open Book Award and has recently been featured on NBC News, Oprah.com and in Glamour magazine (http://www.glamour.com/inspired/2014/11/inspiring-women-of-the-year-from-around-america/50), while also receiving high praise in numerous literary magazines and publications.
I should note also that Nina is a longtime friend of faculty members Emily Perez and Mark Moody, and it was Mark who first introduced me to her work. Her short story collection is well worth reading.
As I mentioned in my last onCAmpus newsletter piece, exposing students to special guests and successful artists allows them to imagine their own futures and to see successful adults in a wide range of endeavors. Nina McConigley's visit will be followed shortly after by Morris Dees' appearance at our school on Wednesday. I will recap both visits next week.
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Nina McConigley's short story collection Cowboys and East Indians recently won the prestigious 2014 PEN Open Book Award and has recently been featured on NBC News, Oprah.com and in Glamour magazine (http://www.glamour.com/inspired/2014/11/inspiring-women-of-the-year-from-around-america/50), while also receiving high praise in numerous literary magazines and publications.
In a recent biography in the Blue Mesa Review (http://bluemesareview.org/issues/issue-no-28/an-interview-with-nina-mcconigley/), the writer captured Nina's biography quite well: "Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and moved to Wyoming when she was ten months old. Her father, an Irishman, was a gas geologist and went to work for an oil company there. Her mother had grown up in Chennai (formerly Madras) in southern India. Nina lived basically her entire life in Wyoming until she went to St. Olaf College as an undergraduate and studied English literature. There, she connected with her Irish roots and wrote her honors thesis on Yeats. She spent the years after college doing a spectrum of different jobs, from working in insurance to going door to door for the Census Bureau. She had always had an interest in writing but kept it mostly to herself. Eventually, while living in Minneapolis, Nina took a creative writing class at The Loft Literary Center and she began writing stories in earnest.
She applied to MFA programs soon after and got into Emerson College. Five days before classes were supposed to begin, Nina’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and so much like Lucky in her story “White Wedding,” she decided to go back to Wyoming and stay with her mom. She then decided to go to the University of Wyoming for her MA (at the time, Wyoming didn’t have an MFA program). The writer John D’Agata was there as a visiting professor, and Nina took a nonfiction workshop with him. D’Agata encouraged her to apply to MFA programs, which she did. She applied to, among other places, the University of Houston because she wanted to work with Chitra Divakaruni. But once there, the person with whom she connected most was Antonya Nelson. Nina now holds an MA in English from Wyoming and an MFA in Creative Writing from Houston.
Nina lives in Laramie now, where she teaches as a lecturer at the University of Wyoming. She is mysteriously drawn to Wyoming, to this place where she grew up. As she said, `I’m happy here. I’ve lived all over and I’ve tried to stay away, but I always come back.'”
I should note also that Nina is a longtime friend of faculty members Emily Perez and Mark Moody, and it was Mark who first introduced me to her work. Her short story collection is well worth reading.
As I mentioned in my last onCAmpus newsletter piece, exposing students to special guests and successful artists allows them to imagine their own futures and to see successful adults in a wide range of endeavors. Nina McConigley's visit will be followed shortly after by Morris Dees' appearance at our school on Wednesday. I will recap both visits next week.
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